FROM THE ARCHIVE

Inma de Santis and horror cinema: the two sides of the mirror

Asier Gil Vázquez

Instituto Universitario del Cine Español / Grupo de investigación TECMERIN

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Most biographical accounts that recall Inma de Santis’ career as an actress, director, and TV host usually resort to a dramatic gimmick, as they begin with the end: that 21st of December of 1989 when she died in a traffic accident in the Western Sahara at the age of 30. Although this text began with that very event, the intention is to avoid the melodramatic tone and to escape, as far as possible, from thinking about her work from the point of view of the damned, the exceptional, or the potentiality of what could have been and never was. Recovering and revisiting Inma de Santis and her short film Eulalia (1985) aims to frame her career in the specific development of Spanish cinema during the Transition and the early years of democracy. Thus, although de Santis may seem to be a footnote in the historiography of Spanish film, her steps give an account of the changes that affected women (and that women brought about) in the cinema of the seventies and eighties.   

Let’s start at the beginning, on the 6th of May of 1964 when a housewife came across a small advertisement in a newspaper. Her eyes stop at the claim: “VERY BEAUTIFUL GIRL”. The same woman sees that it is a casting call for a film and they are looking for a girl between six and seven years old. Hers is only five, but why not give it a go? After all, Spanish cinema is in the throes of a child-star craze (Ibáñez Fernández, 2016: 47). As a matter of fact, Marisol and Rocío Dúrcal released 3 and 2 films in 1964, respectively. Like so many others, this mother and housewife appeared the following day in Torre de Madrid, where the Mexican director Ismael Rodríguez ended up choosing her little girl for a role in El niño y el muro (1965). The girl had entered the audition as Inmaculada Santiago del Pino but left the place with the promising stage name of Inma de Santis.

Figure 1. Casting call for El niño y el muro, published in the newspaper Pueblo on the 6th of May in 1964, page 19. Source: Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. 

Little Inma de Santis does not sing or dance. Nor did she have the wit of Marisol or Dúrcal. Without ever starring in a title designed to showcase her talent, her career was unstoppable, even if she was typecast in more secondary roles, as a shy, angelic, and cute little girl, with blonde hair and big blue eyes. Between 1965 and 1978 she worked in 24 features, most of them in genres like comedies, melodramas, and horror films. In 1966 she also stepped onto the stage for the first time and in 1968 she appeared on television, where she continued to work, especially in dramas and other literary and cultural shows, such as Novela (TVE, 1963-1978), with which she had a remarkable success in Miguel Picazo’s 1974 adaptation of Carmen Martín Gaite’s Entre visillos (Mejón y Palacio, 2013). 

The years went by and her work in film seemed a constant reiteration of the sweet, pretty, and somewhat shy girl character with which she had debuted. At the same time, de Santis reached adolescence in the last years of the dictatorship, when cinema was exploiting a growing eroticism in different titles and genres (Fernández Labayen and Melero, 2022). Her work in horror films, in which she starred in eight titles, bears witness to this. In El bosque del lobo (Pedro Olea, 1969) or Las melancólicas (Rafael Moreno Alba, 1972) she is still an angelic figure, ideal for the role of an innocent victim or a frightened young thing. In 1974, when she was only fifteen years old, her character as a virginal young woman in El asesino de muñecas already had some scenes in underwear and, a year later, her first nudes arrived in Juegos de amor prohibido (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1975). 

Figures 2 and 3. Inma de Santis as the sweet and frightened girl in Las melancólicas (Rafael Moreno Alba, 1972) and as a young girl who discovers the sex (and violence) with Simón Andreu and John Moulder-Brown in Juego de amor prohibido (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1974).

This context of growing sexualisation marked the careers of a large number of actresses, both newcomers and established stars. The press quickly echoed the unease that nudity generated in some of them, such as Inma de Santis. An example of this is the interview published in May 1975 by the magazine Blanco y Negro in which she pointed out that “suddenly, cinema and nudity seem to be synonymous terms” or that “people have wanted to see in me a kind of ‘Lolita’ since I was fourteen” (Cercas, 1975: 53). Months later, several media reported that she had rejected a role alongside Carmen Sevilla in Beatriz (Gonzalo Suárez, 1976) due to the amount of “unjustified” nudity (Amilibia, 1976). Thus, in 1978 she said goodbye to the big screen, at least as an actress.

Without quitting television or the theatre (where the same pressures on women’s bodies did not exist and where she found the possibility of taking on more dramatic roles) in 1978 she enrolled in Image studies at the Faculty of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. This training went hand in hand with a greater political and feminist awareness, together with colleagues like Cecilia Bartolomé and the still photographer Antonio de Benito. After graduating in 1983, she took small but sure steps towards her new calling as a director. One of her first approaches to the direction department was as a script supervisor (alongside Antonio Giménez Rico), a historically feminised job that allowed her to be in contact with different departments on set.

Her first work as a director came in 1985 with Eulalia, a 16-minute short film based on a story by the Venezuelan writer Perla Vonasek. The film centres on Eduardo (Pedro del Río), a dull man whose peace is disturbed when an elderly couple arrives in the flat next door. The constant squeaking of the woman’s orthopedic boot (the Eulalia who gives the play its name) creeps into his thoughts. The façade of marital bliss turns to violent screams at night, which only he seems to hear. Without ever finding out whether it is a case of domestic violence or madness, Eulalia’s presence ends up becoming an ordeal for the protagonist who, on the verge of madness, finds no other solution than to leave his home. To develop the project, Inma de Santis and her partner Manuel de Benito set up the production company Manuel Benito P.C. Despite the low budget, this story of costumbrist horror was well received at festivals, such as the Festival de Cortometrajes de Alcalá de Henares, where it received the first prize, or the Festival de Cine Independiente de Elche, where it won two awards. This project was followed by the commission to direct the documentary short film 6mujeres 6 (1987), financed by the Institute of Women. 

Inma de Santis is rarely mentioned in historical reviews that seek to recover the work of women directors. This is largely because these efforts have focused on fiction feature films, ignoring areas in which women have enjoyed (and still enjoy) greater projection, such as documentaries (see Scholz, Oroz, Binimelis Adell and Álvarez, 2021; Palacio and Mejón, 2022). At the same time, historiographical studies on women directors of short films are scarce. Still, if we look at the yearbooks of the Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) we can see that since the beginning of democracy, there has been a constant number of works signed by women, as shown in the table.

Without going into detail, it should be noted that:

• This period saw the debut of the first generation of men and women who, like Inma de Santis, had trained as filmmakers at university. 
• Although in comparative terms the number of women directors is still lower than that of men, we find a constant thread of women who turn to this format as a means of expression. 
• Five of the listed female directors come from acting backgrounds: Emma Cohen, Ada Tauler, May Heatherly, Rosa María Almirall (birth name of Lina Romay), and Inma de Santis. For decades, acting has been one of the paths to directing for many women, from Rosario Pi, Ana Mariscal, and Margarita Alexandre (García López, 2016) to contemporary women such as Icíar Bollaín, Leticia Dolero, and Itsaso Arana, among others.

Although Heatherly, Romay, and de Santis had a career as scream queens, only the latter opted for this genre as director with Eulalia. This degree of exceptionality is not strange since, as Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos (2024: 68-69) point out, until the end of the second decade of the 21st century there were few women directing horror films. Thus, what could have led de Santis to enter this genre is worth asking. First, it seems more than obvious that Eulalia bears no resemblance to the spectacularisation of violence and the female body that abounded in the horror films in which she worked in the 1970s. The short film delves more into psychological aspects that are justified, to a large extent, by a low budget, which means that the most violent scenes are left offscreen and only the screams can be heard. This also connects to the apparent questioning of collective responsibility and privacy in the face of suspicion of a possible case of gender-based violence. At the same time, de Santis stated in interviews that she did not seek to fall into the intimacy that was assumed to be the norm for female directors because she did not want to be pigeonholed. Perhaps, resorting to horror for her debut was a way of breaking with the expectations of what this “very pretty girl” from El niño y el muro could do.  

Bibliography

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Ibáñez Fernández, J.C. (2016). Cine, televisión y cambio social en España. Editorial Síntesis

Mejón, A. y Palacio, M. (2013). “Los niños de la guerra. La generación de los años cincuenta en TVE: Entre visillos y Los jinetes del alba”, en M. Hausmann and J. Türschmann (eds.), Cine global, televisión transnacional y literatura universal (pp. 171-180). Peter Lang. 

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Rodríguez Ortega, V. y Romero Santos, R. (2024). Spanish Horror Film and Television in the 21st Century. Routledge. 

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Acknowledgments 

This piece of work has been financed with the support of the project “Cine y televisión en España en la era digital (2008-2022): nuevos agentes y espacios de intercambio en el panorama audiovisual”, Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PID2022-140102NB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033)